There will always be a small bunch who will never forgive Justin Currie for the sins of his former band, Del Amitri. Namely, the speed and vigor with which the group abandoned the angular new-wave-ish promise of its 1985 self-titled debut for more conventional pop inroads. Currie makes no apologies for the 17 years and five albums of smart, well-executed, comparatively middle-of-the-road Brit Invasion melodies and country-rock yearnings that followed. It even netted him and his Scottish bandmates an American hit, “Roll To Me,” in 1995. Nowadays, Currie is still living in Glasgow while nurturing an intermittent solo career that now includes The Great War (Ryko). Coming eight years after Del Amitri’s last album, it resurrects the reassuring jangle of that band as it continues Currie’s middle-age explorations of the darker recesses of the male love muscle (i.e. the heart). Currie will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
Currie: I believe Trawler is mainly a book about amphetamines. If it’s not then it is certainly the most lucid description of grown men enduring punishing sleep deprivation since Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. What is ostensibly a document about life on a deep-sea trawler is, as with all Redmond O’Hanlon‘s adventure stories, a deeply troubling and humorous exploration of himself. The manic, hallucinogenic conversations are captured brilliantly by some wonderful novelistic improvisation, and as a tale of men at sea, it is utterly thrilling. I read it when ill with flu, and the bedclothes became tormented like a boiling sea.
Video after the jump.
